Resig and I were bouncing ideas around after I made the form filler, and we came up with something that fits very nicely into the jQuery api (in the form of something very pluggable).

You'll need the following code that will extend jQuery's functionality. Basically, it adds 'saveAsCookie' and 'loadAsCookie' function calls to $() objects.

$.fn.saveAsCookie = function(n,t){
   return this.each(function(){
     createCookie( (n || '') + (this.name || this.id), this.value, t );
   });
 };

$.fn.loadAsCookie = function(n){
  return this.each(function(){
    this.value = readCookie( (n || '') + (this.name || this.id) );
  });
};

Now, we don't want to cache *all* input elements, becuase only some contain user-input and only some need to be saved. For this, I put the class 'cookieme' on all input elements I wanted to save.

 $(document).ready(function(){
   $("form#comments_form").submit(function(){
     $("input.cookieme",this).saveAsCookie("formdata");
   })
   .find("input.cookieme").loadAsCookie("formdata");
 });

So, we squished the code down to 6 lines, 4 of which are actually meaningful.

jQuery++